Facebook cloning seems like a lot of work for not much gain

Well it finally happened, Zachary.

No, nobody burned down my she shed. No, my Facebook account wasn’t hacked either. It was cloned, however.

For years I’ve had to chuckle at friends as they have their accounts cloned. First you would get a Facebook “friend request” from someone you’re already friends with. Often it’s someone you’ve just seen posts from, so you know you’re still a friend.

You check and, sure enough, they are already in your friends list. The next thing that happens is you get a message from your friend’s real account saying they’ve been hacked and not to accept new friend requests from them and to ignore messages.

I was on the road when my “friends” began to dutifully inform me that they had received a new friend request from me and I’d been “hacked.”

Technically, I hadn’t been hacked. I had only been cloned. My password hadn’t been compromised and my bank account hasn’t been emptied yet. But the evening is young and my wife has a home shopping show on TV.

My brother, who doesn’t actually post anything on Facebook, instead just lurking out there in cyberspace, actually dialed me on the phone to let me know I’d been “hacked.” I didn’t set him straight on the terminology, I just told him I knew about it.

By the time I got situated on my own protected WiFi at home that evening I couldn’t search and find a copy of the clone. I knew a few friends said they had reported it so I guess Facebook took it down pretty quickly.

Even more entertaining than watching people struggle with having their account cloned was the time about a year ago when the message was going around telling people that they had been hacked and they needed to take action by sending the message to their friends. Boy did I ever have a lot of those sent to me, including a goodly number from my mother.

I can’t imagine that cloning a Facebook account ever winds up netting the moron doing the cloning much of any gain. Even if they actually hacked the account and got into the real account, most people wouldn’t have that much accessible on Facebook.

It is scary how hard cyber criminals work to try and get your information to either tap accounts or steal identity. Just the same, if I’m going to use social media, I’m going to make it transparent and open to others so I get the most “social” experience and interaction possible.

I’m certainly going to try hard not to be stupid about things but, like Cheryl, I’ve learned from this little incident that seeing the she shed burning isn’t necessarily the end of the world.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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